It’s a clear early spring afternoon and Ngununggula gallery, five minutes from Bowral in the southern highlands of New South Wales, shimmers as if dressed in sequins for Mardi Gras.
This is Belong, a work by the multimedia Aotearoa New Zealand artist Lisa Reihana, designed to draw the audience into Voyager: her gallery-spanning survey of evocative, immersive work, which opened on Saturday.
“I wanted to create something welcoming and joyful as people enter the building,” says Reihana, as the installers put their finishing touches to the exhibition. “I called it Belong because the Ngununggula means ‘belonging’. I wanted to reference some of the art history that already exists here.”
A Māori artist of Ngāpuhi, Ngāti Hine, Ngāi Tū descent, Reihana has played a pivotal role in shaping the direction of contemporary art in Aotearoa New Zealand, and bringing it to a global audience. Best known for her large-scale cinematic works and tableaux vivant, her work sets out to challenge the biases of colonial histories and re-centre First Nations cultural identities.
In 2017, she represented New Zealand at the Venice Biennale with her landmark video installation In Pursuit of Venus [infected] (2015–17), now regarded as a seminal work in Aotearoa’s art history canon, which has been shown at major galleries around Australia and internationally. More recently, Reihana created GROUNDLOOP (2022), a monumental moving-image commission for the atrium of the Art Gallery of NSW’s new building, Naala Badu: a futuristic voyage across land, sea and sky that celebrates Indigenous technologies and ancestral connection.
A vibrant, compact figure in her 50s with wide, childlike eyes framed by a stylish black-and-grey streaked mullet, Reihana looks radiant even in a sweatshirt and black pants – elevated by the trademark red soles on her sneakers. The designer and art connoisseur Christian Louboutin handpicked her for a collaboration – and, she says, “I love shoes”.
Before we enter the gallery, Reihana stoops to pinch a few leaves from a large, rounded native mint bush. “Smell that,” she says. “Bruise it a little, and really smell it. It takes you to another world.”
We pass through the gallery doors – a moment charged with meaning. In Māori culture, Reihana explains, the outside of a building is considered a male space, the inside female. “So, Belong is like an adornment on the head, as you enter the brain of the building.”
The sequins, or “shimmer discs”, as she calls them, reference traditional Māori weaving techniques as well as her digital practice. “I often think of patterns in terms of pixels. These shimmer discs are square, so to me, they speak directly to video editing, Photoshop, data and pixels. They shimmer and the colour shifts and changes, they feel almost alive.”
Reihana leads me into the first space where her 20-minute video work Māramatanga (2024) is installed. Commissioned by the University of Auckland, it unfolds in a series of vignettes featuring six dancers embodying ātua (ancestral spirits with continuing influence) and the carved figures of a Māori meeting house. The sea, mangroves and forests flow across the background in intricate shifting patterns.
Suspended from the ceiling is a model ship, “a last-minute addition”, Reihana confesses, made of laser-cut aluminium. “I want it just to look like a shadow, and get that sense of movement, too. It adds to the voyager theme.”
In the next room, GOLD_LEAD_WOOD_COAL (2024) weaves together the histories of Aotearoa New Zealand and Hong Kong, anchored by the story of SS Ventnor, a British cargo ship wrecked off the New Zealand coast in 1902. Thirteen crew members were lost, along with a cargo that included the bodies of 499 Chinese goldminers, who had died in New Zealand and were being repatriated to their villages in Guangdong.
The wreck was located in 2013, 17km off Hokianga harbour at the northern tip of the North Island. Reihana became fascinated by the tale, which also involved the local Māori community, who carefully gathered up the ossuaries of the miners as they washed ashore; she visited a hospital in Hong Kong where a lot of the Ventnor remains were eventually housed.
“As Māori, we would bury bodies and then collect the bones and put them in boxes, which is quite similar to what Chinese people do. I thought that cultural connection was really interesting,” she says. “This one is about cultural care and connections, about the stories that sit inside the larger histories of colonisation.”
Another video work, IHI (2020), reimagines the Māori creation story of Earth Mother (Papatūānuku) and Sky Father (Ranginui) and their 70 children. In the myth, the children live in darkness, pressed between their parents – until Tāne, god of forests and birds, uses his powerful legs to prise them apart, allowing light to enter and life to flourish.
But IHI focuses less on the cosmic rupture, and more on the intimate relationship between Tāne and his mother. Created for a nine-metre-high LED screen in Auckland, it features two of New Zealand’s most esteemed dancers Taane Mete and Nancy Wijohn. “I wanted the gods to feel massive, cosmic, untethered,” Reihana says. “Here, we’ll achieve that by inviting viewers to sit very close to it.”
“Ah, yes!” she smiles as we approach Reverie, the 2020 video work – a vast digital fresco – commissioned by Louboutin for an exhibition at the Palais de la Porte Dorée in Paris.
“It was one of those classic Venice Biennale meet-ups,” Reihana says. “He saw my work and really liked it and invited me to create a kind of biography drawn from his inspirations in architecture, in Egypt, gardens, and in his incredible art collections. We filmed in Paris in the Porte Dorée, which has this amazing aquarium in it, and in Portugal where Christian was building a kind of folly … we even floated down the Nile!”
She points to a shoe in the video artwork. She recalls filming Louboutin sketching the design but right now, she can’t remember who the shoe was for. She pauses, eyes gazing up. “Oh! Tina Turner, that’s right. That was his shoe made for Tina Turner!”
Reihana wants visitors to be “uplifted” by the exhibition, which is filled with colour and hypnotic movement. “I want to entice and mesmerise the audience,” she says. “If you look into different worlds, you might find a chink you can relate to or something that makes sense to you, and that can open you right up.”
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Voyager runs until 9 November at Ngununggula, in the NSW southern highlands
